Exclusive: As Red Sox leave town, Fort Myers ponders its errors

Mar. 28, 2011

Red Sox fans still flock to City of Palms Park near downtown Fort Myers. That will end Tuesday, when the Red Sox play their final game in the 19-year-old stadium. The city's hopes that the stadium would revive the surrounding neighborhood never materialized. / ANDREW WEST/news-press.com

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Lee County took control of the stadium in 2003 when Fort Myers’ annual bill of $2.1 million to maintain the facility and pay its debt became too much of a financial hardship. / ANDREW WEST/news-press.com

Hailed as the first baseball spring training complex built as a tool for urban renewal, City of Palms Park's purpose extended far beyond simply bringing the Boston Red Sox to Fort Myers.

Proponents of the sparkling edifice - which opened to glowing reviews March 5, 1993 - promised it would revitalize the city's central corridor and downtown district by stimulating construction of hotels, office buildings and restaurants, creating tens of millions of dollars in tax base.

The advocates maintained that development boom and the economic windfall it generated would justify the $51.5 million in bonds the city shouldered to pay the facility's construction costs.

Two decades later, it's clear those bullish financial fantasies never were realized. In fact, the taxable value of the stadium's neighborhood has declined 29.2 percent from $22.5 million in 1991 - the year before construction on City of Palms Park began - to $15.9 million in 2010.

The facility proved to be such a financial hardship for Fort Myers that in 2003, facing a bill of more than $2.1 million in annual loan payments, taxes and operating, maintenance and improvement expenses, the city transferred the stadium's deed to Lee County. The move freed the city from every debt except the annual mortgage.

On Tuesday, the Red Sox will conclude their 19th and final spring training season at City of Palms. Next spring, they'll move into a state-of-the-art, $77.7 million complex on Daniels Parkway in southeast Lee County, paid for by tourist tax funds.

The Red Sox will be gone from downtown Fort Myers, but they'll leave the city with lasting memories, along with a bill for $23.5 million - the amount outstanding on the facility, which won't be paid off until Dec. 1, 2022.

Fort Myers is also left with a lingering question — why didn’t the presence of one of baseball’s most successful and popular franchises result in an economic windfall for the city?

Limited use hurt

The City of Palms Park field is named for the man responsible for bringing the Red Sox to Fort Myers — Wilbur “Billy” Smith.

Smith, the city’s mayor from 1988-96, championed the stadium as the key to reviving central Fort Myers, an area city officials in the early 1990s said was in “a slumlike state.”

Designating the neighborhood as blighted, Fort Myers spent $9.9 million to acquire land and demolish or relocate 173 households to build the stadium and its parking lots.

“It was a controversial project,” Smith said. “Very political.”

Smith and other stadium backers said a Red Sox minor league team and a steady stream of concerts would provide Fort Myers with year-round revenue from the stadium.

However, in February of 1992 — two months after the Red Sox signed their deal with Fort Myers — the Class A minor league Miracle relocated from Miami to Hammond Stadium in south Lee County, the spring training home of the Minnesota Twins.

Armed with the Florida State League’s 35-mile territorial rights rule, the Miracle, citing a need to protect its investment, blocked the Red Sox from moving their Class A team to City of Palms Park.

“That was a major disappointment,” Smith said. “We fought that for years. That would have been a nice amenity for the city, something to go and do.”

The plan to use City of Palms Park as a venue for musical acts didn’t fare much better. The original lease between Fort Myers and the Red Sox granted the team 65 percent of gross concession revenues from non-baseball events and prevented the city from using the field without the team’s consent.

“That was one of my major objections at the time,” said Bruce Grady, the only city council member to vote against the stadium deal. “Why should they have control over anything other than Red Sox games? We said we would buy $100,000 pads to protect the infield, but they were very resistant.”

According to city records, Fort Myers grossed $347,045 in special events during the stadium’s first two years but incurred $462,154 in expenses — a net loss of $115,109.

By 1995, no concert promotions appeared on the city’s budget and 2-year-old City of Palms Park was being used for little more than the six weeks of Red Sox spring training. It wasn’t until the city turned the stadium over to Lee County, which negotiated a new lease with the Red Sox in 2003, that the team relaxed the restrictions on the park’s use.

“That probably had the biggest impact on not having additional development occur — not having year-round activities that would have helped bring people to the area,” said Don Paight, executive director of the Fort Myers Redevelopment Agency, a post he’s held for 24 years. “It’s hard to draw in businesses to make a significant investment when you’re only working with a six-week spring training season.”

Location, location

Aside from beautifying a Fort Myers neighborhood that had become an eyesore, building a stadium in an urban environment had another benefit during a time when capacity crowds at spring training games were a rarity.

“The location virtually guarantees a healthy attendance at ballgames. Its closeness to hundreds of Fort Myers homes makes ‘going to the ballpark’ irresistible,” The News-Press wrote in a 1991 editorial.

Attendance did prove to be exceedingly healthy — the Red Sox annually rank as one of the biggest spring training draws in baseball.

However, the stadium’s location also played a role in the lack of development following its construction.

“In an urban area, it’s very expensive to assemble land to do that sort of thing,” Paight said. “We were probably a little bit shortsighted.”

Former Fort Myers mayor Jim Humphrey, who spearheaded the decision to give City of Palms Park to Lee County in 2003, said limiting the original renewal plan to the stadium and parking areas hindered development.

“Some of the surrounding areas also needed to be addressed and they were not,” he said.

The influx of spring training fans did boost business at Fort Myers restaurants, motels and bars. However, the bulk of the Red Sox’s annual economic impact — estimated at $23.9 million in a 2009 study commissioned by the Lee County Visitor & Convention Bureau — was felt outside the city’s limits.

“You cannot make the argument that any meaningful economic payoff benefited the city,” Grady said. “People coming here for the Red Sox were staying on Fort Myers Beach or in unincorporated Lee County, spending their money there.”

Even Smith admits the demographics of the City of Palms Park neighborhood — a mix of older, longtime residents and low-income renters — hurt its economic impact.

“People moving into Southwest Florida wanted to be in new communities without any urban problems,” he said. “They went to south Lee County.”

That — and not a spring training stadium — is what attracts development, said Gary Tasman, executive director at Commercial Property of Southwest Florida.

“Businesses, restaurants, entertainment venues, hotels and the like are not going to make a decision to locate next to a spring training facility that’s only in use for six weeks out of the year,” he said. “In my experience, I’ve never seen it happen.’’

Tasman said that if such development occurs around the Red Sox’s new stadium, it won’t be because a baseball team trains there.

“It’ll be because there’s a pent-up demand that exists for those types of services or venues in that area,” he said.

Stadium’s impact

From a revenue perspective, City of Palms Park proved a huge money loser for Fort Myers.

In the 11 years it held the stadium before ceding it to Lee County, the city averaged less than $169,000 in annual net income. Through the 2009-10 fiscal year, Fort Myers has paid almost $28 million in mortgage, maintenance and other stadium-related expenses, an average of $1.55 million per year.

“It was so outrageous in its projections that it bordered on something that’s a very negative term,” Grady said. “The city’s paid a whole lot of money for 15 games per year.”

Smith, however, points to some of the ancillary merits City of Palms provided.

“We didn’t get some of the economic benefit we hoped, but we got something even more important, which is civic pride,” he said. “Having a world-class organization in the community, I think the citizens of Fort Myers took great pride in that.”

Smith said the amount Lee County committed to keep the Red Sox shows their value to the region.

“I think the city got a bargain because of the national appeal of the Red Sox,” he said. “In 1991, the people and elected officials thought $24 million was an outrageous price to pay to locate the Red Sox here.

“Seventeen years later, the county was willing to shell out what will turn out to be four times that amount to keep them.”

While acknowledging the loss of the Red Sox will negatively impact the downtown Fort Myers businesses that have been enhanced by spring training, Fort Myers Mayor Randy Henderson said it’s fair to question whether the city got its money’s worth from the stadium.

“What you could perhaps debate is, would it have been better for the city to take the financial resources that went into the stadium and use that to acquire riverfront property to be used in other commercial ways that could have been more productive,” he said. “Reflecting back over it, that’s certainly the question that comes to mind for me.”